Bookslut

February 2004

The Second Book-to-Film Experiment

New School Miramax:
The 2nd Book-to-Film Experiment Results
By Liz Miller

This year, I woke up at 5:30 AM to watch the Oscar nominations
announced live, bleary-eyed and still a little unconscious. So when
Cold Mountain didn't get the Best Adapted Screenplay nomination
I'd been dreading, I was happy and dazed. When it was snubbed for Best
Picture, it seemed an all-too-happy dream.

Cold Mountain turned out to be a great choice for the Second
Book-to-Film Experiment, in part because people were actually
interested in seeing the movie and then reading the book. (Not so much
for Mr. Grisham.) But also, the responses proved to be pretty
enlightening.

Each respondent was asked to rate the book and movie on a 1-to-10
scale, with 10 being the highest. As you can see from the above cheesy
Excel graphs, with two exceptions in each group, both the Book-to-Movie
and Movie-to-Book groups rated the movie lower than the book. What's
interesting about that, I find, is that generally people respond more
highly to the incarnation of a story experienced first. And yet not
only did most of the Movie-to-Book group enjoy the book more than the
movie, but their average ranking for the movie was 5.8, as opposed to
the Book-to-Movie's average movie ranking of 6.5.

Meaning, in short, that once they'd seen the story done badly, reading
a less-bad version was all the more refreshing. And I should know,
because I was one of them.

Cold Mountain isn't a bad movie. It's well-made, well-produced
and like many of the respondents, I was all too grateful for Renee
Zellweger's wacky comic relief. (I'll admit it -- I'm a big fan of
Empire
Records alumni.) It's just not great -- it's an
Orange Julius sort of flick, where the taste of preservatives lingers
long after the sweet orange flavor fades away.

I guess the main problem is that I remember when Miramax made morally
ambiguous movies about serial killers and released foreign films with
all the sexy bits left in. When their distribution wasn't necessarily
about winning Oscars, but challenging the mainstream with independent
voices. Remember that? Wasn't that awesome?

What this movie really needed was the touch of old-school Miramax, not
this new vanilla brand they're peddling. The character of Inman was
ill-cast as the movie's hero, and the book's
depiction of him as a
deserter was much more interesting. Watching Jude Law the hero die a
hero's death had no poignancy, no point really. The book at least made
things a little less simple, a little more ambiguous. Was he a hero?
Anthony Minghella certainly thought so, and leaves no room for
argument. Me, I like arguing.

One thing everyone noticed was the increase in violence towards women.
Ruby is shot, Sarah is nearly raped, Ada's virtue is threatened by a
Very Ugly Man, and Sally's reward for increased screen time is to have
her thumbs brutally smashed while watching her family massacred. Do we
need to be convinced that times were dangerous during the Civil War?
They seemed pretty bad in the book -- without beating on the
wimmenfolk.

In my theater, people were cheering and crying, and I was sitting
there, cold-hearted and sick to death of tragic love stories. Because
the tragic love story seems to undermine everything interesting about
romantic drama -- where relationships are put to the test by intense
circumstances, not cut short by stray bullets or sinking ships. The
only tragic love story I've ever liked was The Terminator,
because I almost bought that "in one day, we loved each other a
lifetime." Cold Mountain the movie, in contrast, seemed to be
more about movie stars fucking than the real heart of the book, which
was about human exhaustion, a dying soul returning home. I didn't much
like the ending in the book (the epilogue, identical to the movie's,
still strikes me as ridiculous), but at least there Frazier gave it some
semblance of meaning, made Inman's return to Cold Mountain more than
just a one-way ticket to Nicole Kidman's vagina. Because in the end,
Nicole Kidman's vagina just can't hold my interest.

But that's just what I thought. There were eighteen people helping out
with this project, and this is only some of the genius that spilled
forth from them:

Yedida (BtM), on reading the book first:It destroyed the movie for me, in the sense that I could enjoy it in
relation to the book, but couldn't appreciate it for its own merits.
Maybe Minghella's Teague is actually a great, true, human character -- I
can't know, because I was already committed to Frazier's
characterizations and use of his characters before I saw the movie.

Rachel Mindel (MtB) on what she would have done differently:I would have made the movie more dirty and less dramatic, played
down the bloody stuff... and highlighted what seems to me the true
theme of the book —- the human will to live, tested and proved
resplendent (this would obviously require some violent moments -— just
not so obviously used to create suspense). Also, I’d have smeared some
chicken poo on an unmade-up Kidman face (Are Anne Beatty and Meryl
Streep the only beautiful actresses courageous enough to go
bare-face?)

Nicole Fitzhugh (BtM) on what she missed from the book:The mountain; the sense that place, that home, that the land, became
the method through which the three characters became engaged in life,
in living.

Wisco (MtB):My boyfriend pointed out one problem with both the book and movie:
Ada, Inman, and Ruby are all perfect people, never doing anything
wrong. Meanwhile, all around them is a highly flawed world of
evil -- people causing harm to others, often because of overwhelmingly
bad situations. It would have been more dramatically satisfying if the
main characters had been a little less sterling -- or at least if they
had been shown struggling with their moral code. I mean, Ada doesn't
even ever read anything that isn't Grade-A prime Literature!

Rajivi (BtM) on changes between the book and the movie:Strangely, even though the film gave Ruby’s character much less
backstory than in the book, somehow she seemed much more fleshed-out in
the movie, and I’m crediting that to Renee Zellweger’s performance. I
preferred listening to the music Ruby’s father and Pangle played to
reading about it. And Jude Law is very beautiful.

George (BtM) on the movie as a whole:Minghella pushes a lot of Oscar-voter buttons: stars who look like
stars (most people in the movie need a bath, Kidman looks like she just
stepped out of the makeup trailer), a panoramic battle scene, a lot of
English actors (to add the patina of class), an oblique sex scene
(including a Kidman nipple, in danger of overexposure this season),
Renée Zellweger doing the loveably crusty Walter Brennan role, and lots
of lush photography.

Kerry Rush (MtB), on the experience of seeing the movie first:I think since I saw the movie first I was able to enjoy each for
what it was. I didn't have to constantly connect the two, which is
often the case when you read a book first. You generally go into a
movie based off a book and expect to see exactly what you imagined.
However, seeing the movie first prevented me from having to make that
constant connection.

Will it be back? This is a question for the future. Another Oscar
season starts in a mere eight months, after all, undoubtedly bloated
with adaptations vying for Oscar gold. (Four out of five Best Picture
nominees this year are adaptations, after all.) Or we could travel
into films past, explore the myriad of DVDs currently available.